Visual/data analysis of 271 people in Singapore who tested positive for Covid-19 despite having one or two shots of the vaccine. This is not a medical study. — The Covid-19 pandemic has confounded medical experts and policy makers alike since it began in 2020. More than a year on, they are grappling with an emerging new mystery involving “breakthrough cases” — people who caught Covid-19 despite being vaccinated.

Going straight from audio to a range of text-based NLP tasks such as translation, summarisation and sentiment analysis — The addition of the Wav2Vec2 model in Hugging Face’s transformers library has been one of the more exciting developments in NLP in recent months. Until then, it wasn’t easy to execute tasks like machine translation or sentiment analysis if you only had a long audio clip to work with.

Efficient transcription of audio files has been one of the major “missing links” in modern NLP — till now. Enter Hugging Face’s implementation of Facebook’s Wav2Vec2 model, which produces impressive out-of-the-box results. — AI can’t write great poetry on its own (yet?). But it can now transcribe a poetry recital really well, if results from the Wav2Vec2 transformer model is anything to go by. My trials using audio clips ranging in length from 62s to 12.5 minutes, including the evocative Inaugural Poem by…

Forecasters correctly predicted that Joe Biden will win, but vastly underestimated the strength of support for Donald Trump. A quick post-mortem suggests that the polls and forecasts became too bullish after August 31. —

Despite the political drama in the home stretch of the US presidential election, two months-long forecasts have held surprisingly steady in projecting a clear win for Joe Biden on Nov 3. — On the surface, the 2020 US Presidential election seems like a wild roller-coaster ride, with each surprising twist and turn of events inducing both panic and dread among voters and observers alike. In comparison, the polls and forecasts in the run up to the vote on November 3 have kept…

Trump’s down in the polls, and forecasts by experts point to a decisive loss on November 3. He doesn’t even seem to be doing as well on Twitter as he did in 2016. Is it game over for the White House incumbent? — With about two weeks to go before the 2020 US Presidential Election, the statistics on multiple fronts are looking rather grim for White House incumbent Donald Trump. Daily forecasts from data analysis outfit FiveThirtyEight and weekly magazine The Economist point to a resounding defeat for him on November 3. …

With all eyes on the outcome of the Nov 3 vote, which metric, poll or forecaster can accurately predict the outcome of a highly volatile race for the White House? Probably none in isolation, but an aggregate of reputable forecasts might help. — Note to readers: The forecasts in this post were completed just as news broke that Donald Trump had tested positive for Covid-19. The impact of this major development won’t be clear for a while, and I’ll update the forecasts as things become clearer.